Enter the dragon

Landed on Sunday morning in Nanning, a remarkably green city in the autonomous Guangxi region of southern China, to attend the Asian Media Workshop organised by the People’s Daily, the largest newspaper in China and also the mouthpiece of the Communist Party of China. This is a two-week tour which will give Asian journalists a sneak peek into what is the most animatedly discussed subject in dragon’s land today – the Chinese dream.

Have already made friends with journalists from Laos, Brunei and Nepal. There are more coming from Vietnam, Indonesia, Timor, Cambodia, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and Myanmar. The first thing we were told by our hosts here was that our Facebook and Twitter accounts won’t work in China. Some jaws fell at the lunch table in a 5-star hotel when this was disclosed amid a furious clatter of chopsticks alongside a buffet where ‘Islamic food’ was clearly marked. This included some noodle shaped jelly fish which couldn’t have been halal. The Nepalese journalists from the only Hindu kingdom in the world were particularly avoiding beef dishes. The food restrictions or the firewall didn’t matter much to me though, having decided to stomach even insects and snakes on this visit and having resisted joining these social networking sites for years now. The best part of the buffet was the variety of steaming Chinese teas available to wash down all the toxins in the delectable food. Every frequent flier to China I spoke to in Ahmedabad before the visit told me food is going to be a problem. Far from it, it is great fun, especially if you don’t wanna know what you are eating.

Much has been made about the ‘Chinese dream’, ever since the new Chinese premier Xi Jinping first articulated the concept some months back after becoming the general secretary of the Communist Party of China and the president of the country. When Xi married celebrity singer Peng Liyuan in 1987, she was much more popular than him. She famously remarked after he became premier in March 2013: “Whenever he comes home, I have never felt there is some leader in the home. In my eyes, he’s just my husband.” Xi and Peng have a daughter Xi Mingze who enrolled as a freshman at Harvard University in 2010 under a pseudonym. The single child norm in China is sacrosanct, given that this is the most populous country in the world, with a libidinous India fast catching up. There is an exception though: if a boy and girl who get married are single children of their parents, they can have the liberty of raising two kids. Such is the discipline in the Chinese society though, that even these couples follow the one-child norm.

The Chinese really resent the way the world media has projected the one-child norm as the ultimate authoritarian weapon against society. They have plenty of grouses against the media, of course. The New York Times reported that the Chinese dream was an old concept, first espoused by Thomas Friedman in an article published in the newspaper tiled ‘China needs its own dream’. Last year, Bloomberg reported that Xi has substantial business interests. This wasn’t substantiated enough. Well, apart from Facebook and Twitter, folks at People’s Daily told us you can’t access NYT or Bloomberg from here. Again, no problem.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

Comments on this post are closed now

Be the first one to review.

Author

Bharat Desai is resident editor of The Times Of India, Ahmedabad. A journalist with 27 years of experience, he has covered developments in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Bihar and Jharkhand. Hooked to journalism since he was 18, he is a postgraduate in English literature, has worked for India Today, Indian Express, Telegraph, Dainik Bhaskar, Free Press Journal and Associated Press, covering varied subjects like the Bhopal gas tragedy, Naxalite problem, dacoits of Chambal, caste killings in Bihar and the post-Babri riots in Surat. He lived through the Kutch earthquake of 2001 and the Gujarat riots of 2002 - the coverage of the latter in TOI-Ahmedabad going on to win the prestigious Prem Bhatia Award For Journalism.

Bharat Desai is resident editor of The Times Of India, Ahmedabad. A journalist with 27 years of experience, he has covered developments in Gujarat, Madhya P. . .